Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Food, Cooking, and Game Preparation Salmon smoker?

A big or little chief is a great hot smoker for salmon, but you're going to need something else for cold smoking.

Before the wasps set up house, this was my cold smoker.



A basic 2X2X3 box with an old bbq with some drier ducting for the smoke. After much experimentation I found the best way for my to get a consistant product was to dry brine the fillets with brown sugar and salt for 2-3 hours at room temp, a quick rinse in cold water to remove the excess sugar/salt, then pat them dry with paper towels. Cut them into strips and put in the smoker and run a fan over night to form the pellicle.



I'd build a small pile of birch kindling the burner and when they burned down to coals I put a chunk of wetter alder and let it smolder for a few hours until burned out. If the alder flamed up I'd hit it with a spray bottle of water, you want to keep the temp in the smoker around 100F. When the wood burns out, put the fan back in for another day to dry out the fish.

For hot smoking the dry brine prep was the same, only I'd put it in the Big chief, put the fan in the flapper door for the wood chips and run it a couple of hours. After that I'd put a mix of water soaked hickory chips and alder chunks and put plug the smoker into a light timer set for 5 hours. A single pan of wood chips is plenty of smoke flavor, and 5 hours seems to get the fish dried just right. The nice thing about the timer is you don't have baby sit it, just plug it in and let it go. Seems smoking is often an evening proposition for me.